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Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius

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HISTORIA

STUDIA WARMIŃSKIE 56 (2019)
ISSN 0137-6624
DOI: 10.31648/sw.3252

Mateusz Fafinski

Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut

1

Freie Universität Berlin

Faraway, So Close: Liminal Thinking and the Use of Geography in Old English Orosius

Słowa kluczowe: wczesne średniowiecze; narratologia; historia uniwersalna; język staroangielski; peryferia.

Keywords:

Early Middle Ages; narratology; Old English; periphery; universal history.

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Introduction. A Peripheral Duality

The Old English Orosius is an early medieval adaptation of Paulus
Orosius’ Historiae Adversum Paganos. The exact date and place of creation of this text have been contested – notwithstanding its earlier association with King Alfred, it is now assumed to be slightly later in date,

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probably written early in the 10 century. This text can be seen as a work between two extremes. Mary Kate Hurley has brilliantly exposi-

ted the conflicted temporalities of the text and the fluctuating nature of

its narrator. (Hurley, 2013) She writes about the two “nows” present in

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the text – the now of the 5 century and the now of the 9 and 10 centuries. (Hurley, 2013, p. 405–406) These temporal planes (that for methodological ease and to stress their linguistic aspect I shall call nunc for the

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  • and nu for the 9 and 10 centuries) constitute two extremities of its

narrative. But those planes also intertwine and create a liminal space in which the demarcations are less sharp – a narrative twilight in which the periphery swells and gains new importance. The broader the periphery is

1

Mateusz Fafinski, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Koserstr. 20,

14195 Berlin, mateusz.fafi[email protected], https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1637-8174.

2

The author would like to thank Sarah Schlüssel and Jakob Riemenschneider for their helpful comments on the draft of this paper.

3

See Godden 2011; arguments for a slightly earlier dating can be found in Bately 2014; as for the ‘Alfredian’ authorship of the text it has actually never been widely accepted and was thorough-

ly disproved in Liggins 1970.

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the less defined it has to be – but also, it can contain much more meaning.

The text gains through those divided temporalities a peripheral duality – it is stretched between two poles both chronologically and geographically. This duality makes the Old English Orosius an exercise in liminal thin-

king – a practice of defining the centre from the periphery. Looking at the

text of the Old English Orosius through that lens, in hope of better understanding its motives, shall be the guiding research principle of this article.
In this paper, I will look at the Old English Orosius from a narrative point of view, and try to trace the shards of liminal thinking understood as a narrative practice. Through an analysis of the narrative strategies of

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the composite Adaptor we will try to see the way in which this text was forged out of the periphery and how liminality, in its many forms, played a crucial role in the Adaptor’s ideological programme. Finally, we shall see how the inclusion of the accounts of voyages by Ohthere and Wulfstan is not a mere afterthought but a plausible continuation of this programme.
Why is the Adaptor so concerned with the expansion of the periphery?
My goal in this article is to show that the Old English Orosius exhibits a remarkable preoccupation with the liminal. Not just liminal in a narrow, geographical sense, but also liminal on a manuscript page and liminal in linguistic understanding. This is not a coincidence. To see this, a combined methodological approach needs to be applied, looking at the Old English Orosius both as a product of a broader narrative tradition and as a tool in the very current early medieval debates on periphery and universality. To achieve this, we need to use both historiographic methods – placing the work of the Adaptor in a broader context – as well as a narratological analysis of the text itself. Through this approach, we might be able to better understand the role of the liminal in the text of the Old English Orosius.

The Textual Margin and a Geographical Periphery

The work of the Adaptor was possible thanks to a number of developments. The particular historical context in which the text has been created plays a crucial part. Maybe the most important of those developments (apart from the very existence of Historiae adversum paganos and

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The question of who was the author of Old English Orosius and in what context the work was created has been discussed and summarised by Godden (Godden, 2012), although no doubt it will attract further considerations. In this text I have decided to use the term “Adaptor”, as it stresses the curatorial practices embedded in the making of the text and the creative nature of their translation. We might not know the name or names of the Adaptor, but, as this article tries to show, we can actually say quite a lot about their motivations and practices. They are, therefore, anonymous only in the narrowest sense of the word.

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the practice of Old English vernacular literature) is to be found before the work on the Old English text even commenced. The long tradition of glossing Orosius forms, upon close reading of the Old English Orosius, the key to its creation. As Godden has established, the Adaptor has probably worked from a copy of Historiae made somewhere on the Continent, perhaps in an East Francian milieu. (Godden, 2011) Therefore, they were part of a narrative community which had its own preoccupations and areas of focus. The glosses were of course connected, but not necessarily constrained, by the original goals and concerns of Orosius. The Adaptor, together with the Continental glossators, formed what we could call a narrative community – a group sharing similar narrative strategies that arose from their particular preoccupations and guided their writing. This community has pushed the periphery (both geographically and cognitively) further than Orosius had imagined or intended. The membership of that community gave the Adaptor a mediated access to classical works they could not have possessed in Britain. Some of the results of those strategies were incorporated in the body of the Old English text, thus re-centering them from the margins and putting the outcomes of liminal thinking at the very heart of their undertaking. From their perspective, the antique sources used to expand the original narrative of Orosius existed as a textual periphery – as glosses and marginalia – and by incorporating them inside the text of their adaptation, they bring them back to the centre. This narrative circle was preoccupied not only geographically but also textually with the same subjects as the peripheries of the Carolingian world – but understood, thanks to their textual interests, as an extension of Rome. This community (and the strategies that it developed) was very much an imagined one, driven by the shared experience of texts read and knowledge passed but very much composed of people who had no direct contact

with each other (Anderson 2006, p. 6–7).

There are other reasons why the glossing tradition was important.
Godden’s theory that the source text of the Adaptor was a heavy glossed East Francian manuscript of Historiae might also help to explain the occasional Hungarians and Bulgarians appearing in the text – the “near Others” of the Carolingian world (OEO, p. 291). The geographical intere-

sts in those glosses might reflect the preoccupations of an unknown St

Gall glossator (Lozovsky, 2006, p. 340–346). Those glosses are also, in turn, the results of the narrative community’s remarkable preoccupations with a geographical periphery, looking over the liminal and through the porous membrane that simultaneously divided and connected the “inside”

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and the “outside” of the imperial worlds of the 9 century. “Insides” and “outsides” are, of course, relative and forced terms.

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The text itself is characterised sometimes by an extreme fluidity of

classifications. To see a glaring example, one needs to look no further than the Adaptor’s description of “Germania”, itself possibly also rooted

in an East Frankish tradition (Godden, 2011, p. 316). That definition was

extremely broad, encompassing land from the Don to the Rhine, but spe-

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cifically excluded Britain (OEO, 2016, p. 33). Geographical descriptors are constructed by the Adaptor within the narrative community, but with

a relative ease and flexibility.

The Adaptor gained their knowledge from the margin and from the intertextual space, where the glosses are nesting – i.e. from a layout periphery. This connection should not surprise us, as the textual periphery and the practice of Old English translation are very closely intertwined. Enough to think here of the Leiden glossary and how the practice (and experience) of a commentary gloss linked the patristic and historical works of Late Antiquity (the nunc) with the vernacular nu. The particular interest of the Leiden glossary in Late Antiquity works is a great

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example of such practice (Lapidge, 2008, p. 33). The periphery of a text

forms the connective tissue of the narrative community – the Old English Orosius is quite literally born out of a textual fringe.

The fluid nature of both the text and form of Old English Orosius is perhaps its defining feature, obscured by just two complete surviving ma-

nuscript witnesses of the adaptation. The mouldable phase of the text of Old English Orosius lasts not only between the Late Roman Empire and the early medieval England (accommodating, so to speak, the textual criticism on the Historiae), but longer, into its manuscript receptions. It is possible that the accounts of Ohthere and Wulfstan’s voyages to the East were added after the initial translation was completed, possibly at

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the beginning of the 10 century. Their addition could have been the fi- nal touch in the creation of the historiographical product that we read today. When, therefore, we speak of the authorship of the text, we need to keep in mind the essentially composite nature of the Adaptor. The creator persona of the Old English Orosius should be seen not as one trans-

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Perhaps worth mentioning here is that the trope of understanding Old English Orosius as a “Germanic” history is misleading. The notion of what the Adaptor and their contemporaries

could understand as “Germanic” is difficult to express in modern terms. Moreover, the perceived affinity toward the Goths in the Old English narrative does not have to and, indeed, should not be

seen in strict ethnic terms. Simply put, what we might interpret as “Germanic” is often our projection of modern misconceptions.

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Leiden glossary, as quite conclusively shown by (Lapidge, 2015) on the basis of manuscript evidence, was a through and through insular product.

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For Godden’s arguments see: (OEO, p. 432). Valtonen is more cautious, pointing that the account might have been based on notes created “before, after or during the translation (Valtonen 2008, p. 272) also noting the lack of their stylistic adaptation (Valtonen 2008, p. 276).

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lator but a community of interpreters that worked over an extended period of time.
This practice of continuous adaptation can help us to better understand the motivations of the Adaptor, as it did not end with the transla-

tion being finished. We need to look at the manuscript transmissions and

the way the text was used and moulded afterwards. The inclusion of

a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle C after the Old English Orosius in

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the Cotton Tiberius B i. serves as an example of this custom. This inclusion does not necessarily mean that the compilator of the manuscript understood Rome as fallen and England as its replacement (Discenza,

2017, p. 110). What it does suggest is a form of a narrative continuity be-

tween those two texts. This marvellous superposition of the two – which is just another argument for more manuscript-centred readings of medieval texts – should place Englalond as an extension of the Roman world

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in the eyes of the creators.
In such reading, in which codicology is a part of the narrative as well, we can see the continuous adaptation of Historiae as a process close to

the original purpose of Orosius, which can be summarised as follows:

Rome is the empire that accepted Christianity. Even though it has many

failings it is, in the Orosian sense of history, the fourth and final empire.

What the Adaptor makes clear, especially in the geographical excursus, is that Rome’s survival was possible because of its transformation. By mutating its meaning, adapting itself, and becoming an empire of an expanding periphery, Rome transcended its geographical borders. Far from being fallen – some scholars have suggested that the Adaptor saw Rome as collapsed (Harris, 2004, p. 93–100) – the empire lives on in its new

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form. Englalond is an extension of this new form and it is visible not only in the textual but also in the manuscript layer.
The city of Rome may have decayed but it is simultaneously protected by “Christian faith” (OEO, 2016, p. 119). After all the Adaptor, in a curatorial decision, omitted the sack of Rome from their version and, as we shall see, replaced it with a narrative of repossessing the periphery. What

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Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe has conclusively proven, on the basis of a codicological analysis of the manuscript, that Cotton Tiberius B i. constituted a unit before Cotton acquired the manuscript in the sixteenth century and that it was the Chronicle text has been added to the Orosius

text and not the other way round (O’Brien O’Keeffe, 1998, p. 139–143) The collators of the manu-

scripts are just as valid members of the narrative community of the Adaptor as the East Frankish glossators.

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England as a term of difficult applicability was very well laid out by (Discenza, 2017, p. 8–9). I prefer the term introduced by Nicolas Howe, Englalond, as it conveys the distance which

divides our understanding of England from the England of nu (Howe, 2008).

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A slightly different interpretation has been proposed by (Leneghan, 2015) who, mostly on the basis of the Lauderdale manuscript, sees Old English Orosius as a West Saxon imperial history.

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the city represented, with its decaying walls, has not been superseded but it has been transformed. Hence, in further curatorial intervention, Orosius’ boastful and factually untrue (but narratively crucial) mentions of Christ being a Roman citizen (Orosius, 2010, p. 262) and of the ubiquity of Roman laws everywhere in the world (Orosius, 2010, p. 209) were removed. Those are untenable claims in the nu. The periphery of the world has shifted – it now includes a large liminal zone, where Roman has a different meaning. Thanks to this process of continuously adapting the liminal space, the extent of this world is much broader. It encompasses most of the known world, while for Orosius it was just a thin fringe.
The Adaptor’s understanding of the acute sense of change in their world is visible in the language they used. The history remains common, but because of the shifted peripheries the world to which this history applies has to be described differently. The Mediterranean for example is no longer “the sea, which we call Our sea” – “mare hoc quod dicimus No-

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strum” (Orosius, 2010, p. 37) but “Wendelsæ” (OEO, 2016, p. 24). It is

interesting to contrast those changes of geographical parlance with the retained use of the phrase “our ancestors” that opens both texts. The connection with Rome is, in a narrative sense, unbroken. But the world has transformed and the Adaptor is ready to acknowledge this. The changing geographical circumstances are not an argument against the continuation of Roman heritage. The Adaptor remains here a historian and uses that role to retain a function of a “cultural broker” (Reimitz 2014) between the worlds of the nunc and the nu.

Liminal Thinking

Already the original text of Historiae looked with a certain sympathy on the events and peoples on the periphery of the Roman world (Merrills, 2005, p. 55). The inhabitants of the fringe were seen at times as peaceful and were even ever so slightly idealised for narrative purposes. The Adaptor was thus working with a text already geared towards the margins. In this respect, what they did is a continuation of the tradition set by the

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Late Antique historian. But while Orosius’ purpose was polemical, the

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On the meaning of “Wendelsæ” see (Kuhn, 1975, p. 28; Woodworth, 1891, p. 135); cognate to Old High German wentilseo it might mean the sea of the Vandals – in itself a great example of

liminal thinking, where it is the periphery, or rather its inhabitants, that give the name to a central region.

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In fact, such geographical continuities have been put forward in the past and attempts have been made to trace shards of Late Antique geographical knowledge in the description of the nu periphery, see (Linderski, 1964).

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purpose of the Adaptor was less defined. Imperial elements might have

been at play – perhaps a form of West Saxon ideological narrative in the

vernacular idiom (Leneghan, 2015, pp. 679–690). The Adaptor was less

interested in showing the peaceful edge as a counterpoint to the warring centre, which seemed to have been the purpose of Orosius’ sympathetic description. Instead, they show the periphery as a vital and necessary element of the world as a whole. It is less a matter of contrast and more of the understanding of totality. Nevertheless, the Adaptor took a strong cue from Orosius in making what appears in their peripheral vision as

sharp and fully fledged as possible (Merrills, 2005, p. 98). They went even further than that – they made the margin much more fleshed out than

the centre itself. The world of nu is a world where those two coexist on much more equal terms.
In the world of Old English Orosius, periphery is a crucial concept as it establishes the perimeter inside which history will happen. The very

first sentence of the work puts periphery on the central stage:

Ure yldran ealne þysne ymbhwyrft þyses middangeardes, cwæþ Orosius, swa swa Oceanus ymbligeþ utan, þone man garsegc hataþ […]

Orosius said that our ancestors divided the whole expanse of this world into three parts, surrounded by the sea called Oceanus […]. (OEO, p. 25)

The world is surrounded by Oceanus. The very place where this histo-

ry is to unfold is defined by its periphery, by garsegc. For history to hap-

pen, it is necessary to delineate its stage. The word garsegc is able to con-

tain many meanings (Bately, 1972, p. 48), but to start with the one that stresses its connotations with a boundary is striking. It is difficult not to

see it as a conscious decision.
There is no preface at the beginning of Old English Orosius, which has been noted as an aberration, as it is often in the prefaces of Old English adaptations that a crucial ideological programme is laid out. (Discenza, 2002) We do not know if the original Adaptor intended a preface for the text, but the later copyists (who, as we have established, are co-creators of the narrative of Old English Orosius) left the text without one.
Skipping the preface and jumping straight into the geographical description of the world reinforces the notion that history is a spatial phenomenon, bound to the material cosmos where it happens. This notion of spatial history is already a very important feature of the Historiae, but for the Adaptor it takes centre stage. Regularly they put it as a main theme of their work, closely knit with the universal aspirations. But for the Adaptor, the geographical knowledge that underlines the writing of history was dynamic. When they described the limits of Europe, they

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wrote “swa we hit firmest witan” – “as far as they are known” (OEO, 2016,

p. 32–33), conveying that in their narrative, the nature of geographical knowledge is changing. It is interesting to contrast this with Orosius who

readily acknowledged his own ignorance: “as far as I am able” (Orosius,

2010, p. 123), but perceived geographical knowledge more as a static phenomenon. For the Adaptor, the limits of what is known are expandable.

This might be influenced by their experience of the peripheral and, as we shall see, might find its fullest expression in the account of the journey of

Ohthere and Wulfstan. Moreover, this strategy made the geographical

section into a section fulfilling the role normally taken by a preface. Here

the liminal thinking ideological programme is laid out.
The Adaptor understood that their geographical knowledge had not only a different focus but also a larger scope than the one of Orosius himself. To what extent they put Englalond in the centre and the rest of the world in the periphery is debatable. What is clearer is that when describing the geography of the known world, the Adaptor busied themselves with the limits of the Roman world understood as the world known to the successors of Rome. This has a particular narrative and historiographical reasoning. In this narrative, Englalond is a conductor, an extension (maybe the most important one) of the Roman world. Through it, the limits of what is known can be pushed further. In the nu, with the inclusion of the Continental material, the narrative of the Old English Oro- sius becomes also a repository of the expanded geographical knowledge of the East Frankish glossators. The Adaptor understood well that the em-

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  • The OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY Defines “Handbook,”

    The OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY Defines “Handbook,”

    Amodio, Mark C. 2014: The Anglo-Saxon Literature Handbook. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. xvi + 412 pp. Paperback. ISBN 978-0- 631-22698-⒎ 27.99€ he OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY defines “Handbook,” on the second entry of the term, as “a book containing Tconcise information on a particular subject; a guidebook.” You do not need to revise its back cover to state that the book object of this review could be classifi ed as such. Specially if this book constitutes, in the humble opinion of this reviewer, not a handbook but the handbook on Anglo-Saxon Literature, whose fate will be to become the standard introductory reference of our fi eld. In the academic world very few important things are produced without acknowledging—or challenging—what others have previously done. That is especially true in the academic genre of the handbook/companion/guide, where previous scholars have done a tremendous amount of work on the subject. If Bernard of Chartres stated back in the 12th century that scholars were just “nanos gigantum humeris insidentes,” i.e. “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants,” it is clear that references such as Solopova & Lee (2007), North & Allard (2007), Treharne & Walker (2010), Stodnick & Trilling (2012), Lees (2013), or Godden & Lapidge’s (2013) new edition of their classic companion, constitute important previous enta geweorc whose authors could be seen as those giants upon which contemporary handbook writers need to stand on, although none of the aforementioned references are mentioned in the bibliography, exception made of Godden and
  • The Ostrogothic Kingdom in the Old English Boethius and the Germanic Myth of Origin in Anglo-Saxon England

    The Ostrogothic Kingdom in the Old English Boethius and the Germanic Myth of Origin in Anglo-Saxon England

    ANNALES NEOPHILOLOGIARUM 10 Rok 2016 DOI: 10.18276/an.2016.10-08 LITERATUROZNAWSTWO I KULTUROZNAWSTWO JACEK OLESIEJKO* Wydział Anglistyki, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu THE OSTROGOTHIC KINGDOM IN THE OLD ENGLISH BOETHIUS AND THE GERMANIC MYTH OF ORIGIN IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND The Old English Boethius, the vernacular translation of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius’s Consolatio of Philosophae, is attributed to King Alfred the Great (849– 899 A.D.). He is credited with authorship in the two prefaces that accompany the work surviving in two versions, one entirely in prose, the other alternating verse and prose sections, as Boethius’s prosometric original does. The most recent editors of the Old English Boethius claim that the Old English prose Boethius precedes the vernacular prosometric version.1 When it comes to Alfred’s authorship, it cannot go unnoticed that the identity of both prefaces as Alfredian translations have been a matter of controversy among literary historians, some of whom doubt Alfred’s authorship of the Old English Boethius. Malcolm Godden observes that, unlike other preface that accompany Alfred’s works, both the prose and the metrical preface refer to the king in the third person.2 Nicole Guenther Discenza doubts that king Alfred composed the prose preface to Boethius because the preface defeats the purpose served by other Alfredian prefaces.3 Discenza stays clear of Sisam’s view that the composer of the preface worked a forger or fabricator. She suggests that “an admirer, rather than fabri- * Jacek Olesiejko is a lecturer at the University of Adam Mickiewicz and Wyższa Szkoła Języków Obcych im.
  • SELIM 16.Indb

    SELIM 16.Indb

    OLD ENGLISH GEOND EXPRESSING DURATION OF TIME: THE WINCHESTER USAGE1 Abstract “The Winchester group” is a restricted group of late Old English texts, including the works of Æl ic, which are connected with Winchester. They are known to show a remarkable uniformity in their choice of vocabulary within certain groups of synonyms. Lexical studies confi rm the existence of “Winchester words”—the Winchester group’s preferred words (Gneuss 1972, Ono 1986, Hofstetter 1987 & 1988, Gretsch 2001). However, no study has considered the possibility that the Winchester group may show syntactic uniformity as well. In this article, I focus on the preposition geond ‘through, throughout’, used to express duration of time. In the Old English period, the adverbial accusative was commonly used for this function. In fact, temporal prepositions were not yet fully developed, and geond was rarely employed as such. Utilizing the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, I will demonstrate that the use of the temporal geond is strictly confi ned to the Winchester group. Keywords: Æl ic, duration of time, geond, Old English, temporal preposition, the Winchester group. Resumen El “grupo Winchester” es un grupo reducido de textos en inglés antiguo tardío, que incluye las obras de Æl ic y que están conectados con Winchester. Se sabe que muestran una clara uniformidad en la elección de vocabulario en lo concerniente a ciertos grupos de sinónimos. Los estudios léxicos confi rman la existencia de “palabras Winchester”—las palabras preferidas por el grupo Winchester (Gneuss 1972, Ono 1986, Hofstetter 1987 & 1988, Gretsch 2001). Sin embargo, ningún estudio ha considerado la posibilidad de que el grupo Winchester pueda mostrar tambien uniformidad sintáctica.
  • Links Between Landowners and the State,” “The Field of Old English—The Nature of the Language, and Between “Landlordship and Peasant Life” (158)

    Links Between Landowners and the State,” “The Field of Old English—The Nature of the Language, and Between “Landlordship and Peasant Life” (158)

    OLD ENGLISH NEWSLETTER Published for The Old English Division of the Modern Language Association of America by The Department of English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville VOLUME 42 NUMBER 1 & 2 2009 ISSN 0030-1973 Old English Newsletter Volume 42 Number 1 & 2 2009 Editor R. M. Liuzza, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Associate Editors Year’s Work in Old English Studies: Daniel Donoghue, Harvard University Bibliography: Thomas Hall, University of Notre Dame Contributing Editors Research in Progress: Heide Estes, Monmouth University Conference Abstracts: Dana Oswald, University of Wisconsin, Parkside Bibliography: Melinda Menzer, Furman University Editorial Board Patrick W. Conner, West Virginia University Antonette diPaolo Healey, Dictionary of Old English David F. Johnson, Florida State University Catherine Karkov, University of Leeds Ursula Lenker, University of Munich Mary Swan, University of Leeds Assistant to the Editor: Teresa Hooper The Old English Newsletter (ISSN 0030-1973) is published for the Old English Division of the Modern Language As- sociation by the Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN, 37996-0430; email [email protected]. The generous support of the Department of English at The University of Tennessee is gratefully acknowledged. Subscriptions: The rate for institutions is $20 US per volume; the rate for individuals is $15 per volume, but in order to reduce administrative costs the editors ask individuals to pay for two volumes at once at the discounted rate of $25. Individual back issues can be ordered for $5 each. All payments must be made in US dollars. A subscription form is online at www.oenewsletter.org/OEN/subscription_form.pdf.
  • Translation and Orality in the Old English Orosius

    Translation and Orality in the Old English Orosius

    Oral Tradition, 13/2 (1998): 377-397 Translation and Orality in the Old English Orosius Deborah VanderBilt The focus of oral studies in Anglo-Saxon literature has been primarily on poetic texts; the poetry’s oral-formulaic language and its way of transforming narratives according to its own traditional idiom have made it a fascinating area of study. Within this field, however, critical analysis has deepened from early, often rote applications of the Parry-Lord theory toward more precise consideration of the “tradition-dependent” features of oral- traditional texts in Old English, features that may or may not find parallels in texts from other oral cultures.1 Additionally, the direction of oral studies of the past two decades in medieval literature generally as well as in Anglo- Saxon literature in particular has included issues of audience, reception, and transmission—what we might characterize as the dynamics of orality, that is, how orality operates as one of the “socially conditioned and socially functional modes of approach to the transmission of knowledge” (Bäuml 1980:246). A recent, broad-ranging collection of essays on medieval literature subtitled Orality and Textuality in the Middle Ages reflects emphasis on the fact that orality and literacy always involve social, and in the latter case technological, constructions that support the mode(s) of communication at each extreme of the oral/literate dichotomy and all along the spectrum in between.2 Franz Bäuml’s definition, cited above, recognizes that orality affects all communication in an oral culture. In Anglo-Saxon England, the poetic idiom of Old English was a specialized form of language that arose within that oral culture before the advent of literacy, but the use of the idiom is only one manifestation of general assumptions operating within Anglo-Saxon culture, assumptions that mark all aspects of the vernacular language and that continue to mark it even after the ascendancy of writing 1 The phrase is from Foley 1980; see further Foley 1990: espec.
  • The Dating of Old English Prose: Some Problems and Pitfalls, with Special Reference to the Alfredian Canon1

    The Dating of Old English Prose: Some Problems and Pitfalls, with Special Reference to the Alfredian Canon1

    The Dating of Old English Prose: Some Problems and Pitfalls, with Special Reference to the Alfredian Canon1 Janet Bately The dating of Old English texts is a far from simple task. In books today we may expect to be given both the name of the author and the date of first publication, as well as details of any subsequent impression or revision. However, in the case of those compositions in prose that have survived from the Anglo-Saxon period, we can put names to no more than half-a-dozen writers using the vernacular, and every stage in the process of fixing a particular work in time – even very approximately – is beset by difficulties. A major problem is the absence of firm information about the dates of birth, and often also of death, of those individuals whose names we do know,2 and of one of whom it has even been questioned whether he wrote anything at all. Another is the vulnerability of their works to the ravages of time. There is no way of calculating how many manuscripts have been recycled or destroyed over the years. Of those that remain, a number have lost their opening leaves – the place where an authorial preface might occasionally be found, while apart from copies of legal documents, only a handful giving indications of when they were written have survived.3 1 It was with particular pleasure that I received the invitation of Trinity College Dublin to give the 2012 Kemble lecture. It was here that my great-great- grandfather read Theology just under 200 years ago.